Public Safety

The Need For Speed?

What towns and cities need is for people to slow down

While distracted driving has become an undisputed cause of so many collisions in Connecticut towns and cities, speed is an aggravating factor in nearly all of them. What can be a minor accident easily turns into a severe crash with just a few milesper-hour. Speed cameras, approved by the State Legislature last year, are going to start appearing on Connecticut roads next year.

The Town of Washington will have the privilege of becoming the first municipality in the state to adopt the cameras. Writing in the publicly available plan submitted to the Department of Transportation’s Office of State Traffic Administration First Selectman Jim Brinton writes that the town’s plan “is designed to reduce the dangerous conditions within our community overall, and at the selected locations specifically. These dangerous conditions contribute to traffic collisions, serious injuries, and deaths involving pedestrians, bicyclists, motorists and vulnerable roadway users on our roads.”

Included in the 29-page application submitted to the DOT is the location of the proposed cameras, as well as data and use cases. One location was chosen because the “straightaway roadway feature entices motorists to accelerate through the area.” The town received resident complaints for this stretch of road, but because police resources are limited, alternative traffic enforcement, i.e., speed cameras, will help keep roads safe.

Public Safety resources are a typically under-referenced factor in the need for speed cameras, as cops and State Troopers cannot be maintaining all roads all the time. Per data in the application, speed related traffic stops account for anywhere between 35% and 45% of all traffic related stops in the town, averaging around 2380 stops a year for speeding. This technology will not only free up officers from these locations, but allows them to do other safety-related tasks.

The technology might be new to Connecticut, but the first speed cameras were installed in two Texas towns nearly 40 years ago — so long ago that the technology involved a camera film that needed to be processed and developed in order to identify who was speeding. But like so many other pilot programs, the residents responded poorly believing that the towns were just out to make money, throwing rocks at the cameras and not paying the fines.

Today, the technology has advanced and has become more widely accepted — and in many cases, they have not become the cash cows many fear they would. The reasoning is simple, once people know where the cameras are, they stop speeding there. And at the end of the day that is the goal.

It’s likely that many more towns and cities will have plans approved over the coming year — New Haven and Stamford have been cited as two places with proposals already with the DOT. In 2025, towns and cities must use all tools at their disposal to make our roads safe for all.

For more information visit https://portal.ct.gov/dot/programs